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Dallas History

A Little Nintendo Story That Will Make You Cry

Or maybe I’m just a sucker for Navy SEAL war stories involving little kids.
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For D Magazine’s October issue, I spoke with Stephen Holley, a former Navy SEAL and current owner of the new hunting apparel company SIXSITE. You can read the interview as it appeared in the magazine here. He told me one story, however, that hit me pretty hard but was unfortunately too long to run in the magazine.

To set the scene: Holley was a Navy SEAL at the time, around August or September 2005. Somewhere in the Sunni Triangle between Fallujah and Ramadi (“a pretty rough area, and obviously with what’s going on over there right now, still is”). He said this was “in the midst of a very interesting deployment, just a very personal pivotal moment for me that really gave it another human element that I had not experienced before.”

Holley’s story, as told to me:

One of the missions that we would do was sniper overwatch missions. We would go into a neighborhood the night before the Army or the Marine Corps was scheduled to do an operation or engage with the community in some way. We would sneak in at night and get set up so we could protect them in case snipers were trying to kill them or people were trying to ambush them or lay bombs, etc. So, to do that, we would go into these neighborhoods in relatively small forces, usually three to four SEALs and an interpreter.

We were snipers, and, to go into these houses, you had to pick the right house that gave you the most strategic position to watch. Imagine if you were to wake up tonight and four guys with big guns tell you you’re not going to leave the house for the next 24 to 48 hours and, sorry, that’s just the way it is. So we would take over these houses and contain the families inside, which was obviously an inconvenience for them, but we tried to make it as comfortable as possible so they could go about their normal day of activities without leaving the house for the most part.

Well, we get into one house real late, before dawn one morning, and it took us a long time to get into this house. It was our second or third house that we tried to get into because of strategic positioning. It was a husband, wife, and two young sons that were probably about 4 and 6 years old. We put the family in the parents’ bedroom for the rest of the night to sleep. We had our snipers set up on top, and myself and my communicator, who carried the radio, were downstairs in the courtyard. My communicator took about an hour nap then told me to get some sleep. I told him, “If this family comes out, wake me up.” So, I scooched back into this dark room off the courtyard and took my helmet off and just laid back trying to catch some sleep before the sun came up.

When I woke—you know when you come out of a sleep sometimes you can hear things before you can process?—I thought I was dreaming because I heard the theme to the Super Mario Bros. that we all know so well. So I’m coming out of this sleep and I hear the theme “doodoo doo doodoo doo.” I open one eye, and there’s two of the old-school Nintendo cords laying across my face. I look over to my right and realize I had inadvertently laid down about two feet in front of this TV and video game system. I then looked the other direction and the two Iraqi boys were sitting Indian style, and they had the controls stretched as far as they could go, but I was clearly right in the way of where they usually sat to play this game. They were paying me no mind. Just playing Super Mario, and I had a flashback at that moment to me when I was a kid.

I had learned a couple weeks into that deployment that my wife was pregnant for the first time, and we were expecting a son. All of a sudden the nature of what we were doing in that conflict, being in that house with that family and those boys in a very dangerous neighborhood, it didn’t change my perception, but it gave me another filter through which to view the reason why we were there, and the importance of why we were there, and the fact that these were kids that were just like me, and we just happened to grow up in drastically different circumstances. But they were just sitting there playing Nintendo on a Saturday morning like any other kid in America would have been doing.

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